Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Right-wing commentator Alex Massie is continuing with his regular-as-clockwork routine as an "equal opportunities irritant", with two or three articles designed to irritate the Yes campaign being automatically followed by two or three articles designed to irritate the No campaign. Mind you, my own pet theory is that he's on a one-man mission to prove Martin Boon right about the existence of 'Shy No Syndrome'.

Fresh from his faintly comical failure to spot that Joyce McMillan was dripping with self-deprecating irony in her comments about Scottish UKIP voters, Massie has come up with yet another gem (which may well be slightly tongue-in-cheek but is presumably still meant to make some kind of logical sense) -

"One other thought: if we assume a No vote in September, it is now the case that all good Scottish nationalists – ie, those keenest to secure more powers for Scotland – should vote Conservative in May 2015. Only a Tory victory then can give Scotland control of more of the tools and levers the nationalists consider so essential. They might not like it but such are the ironies we must all endure from time to time."

Hmmm. This first of all assumes that you can trust that the Tories have the slightest intention of actually implementing their devolution proposals, any more than you could trust Edward Heath in 1968 when he promised a Scottish Assembly, or Alec Douglas-Home in 1979 when he promised that a No vote to devolution would lead to the Tories producing a better form of devolution later on. A few unkind souls might suggest that putting your trust in a party with a track record like that would make you (to use a term that Massie has been known to give the odd spin himself) a "f***ing zoomer".

But let's be ultra-generous and assume there's some kind of chance that these proposals would see the light of day. In what parallel universe are the SNP (and probably the Liberal Democrats for that matter) going to do anything other than vote in favour of them at Westminster? So how exactly is it a better strategy to vote for the Tories, who have just one Scottish seat and few realistic targets, than it is to vote for the SNP, who have six seats and several targets? The absolute most that could be said is that if you really only care about the constitution and not about human decency at all, there might just about be a case for voting Tory in a Labour/Tory marginal seat - but unfortunately for Massie, there isn't really any such thing in Scotland.

But other than those minor details, what a truly fabulous piece of advice from Alex.

To be fair there's nothing remotely new or surprising about out of touch right-wing twits talking absolute drivel about scotland as the Torygraph and it's dimwitted cheerleaders prove every day.

Who on earth is going to believe Cameron's PR placewoman Davidson considering the senior tory Michael Forsyth rubbished her feeble jam tomorrow proposals as a mere "distraction". It's certainly not as if the tories were going to be trusted on this as it was.

There are more pandas than scottish tory MPs for a reason and that reason is hardly about to change when the witless shrieking from out of touch tories just keeps right on coming. They are an absolute gift to the Yes campaign for which we should be extremely thankful. The louder they are the more damage they will do to the No campaign.

It may be excessively charitable to assume that Alex Massie is trying to "make some kind of logical sense". In any earlier post he asked "When was logic ever expected to govern Toryism?" I think he was serious, though I may just have misread the irony.

It may be excessively charitable to assume that Alex Massie is trying to "make some kind of logical sense". In any earlier post he asked "When was logic ever expected to govern Toryism?" I think he was serious, though I may just have misread the irony.